Yassine Kanjaa, the 25-year-old Moroccan who entered two churches in Algeciras with a machete on Wednesday night, killed a sacristan and wounded a parish priest, resides illegally in Spain.
He arrived in Algeciras, the Andalusian city opposite Gibraltar, from Morocco in the summer of 2022. He was arrested in June last year in a police check of documents and the National Police started a file a his deportation to Morocco for not having the necessary documents. Seven months later, his extradition was still pending.
Kanjaa was arrested in central Algeciras shortly after he provoked the attacks. I walked slowly and he still had the machete in his hand.
Was it a terrorist attack?
In the next few hours he will be transferred to Madrid to testify before the National Tribunal which, from the outset, has opened an investigation for alleged terrorist attack.
This Thursday, however, the Spanish Interior Minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, who was in Stockholm for a meeting of ministers which he suspended to travel to Algeciras, assured that it cannot be confirmed, for now, whether it was a question of of a terrorist attack.
“There are no third parties involved in fact”, confirmed the minister.
“Let the investigation develop adequately to determine the nature of the events, terrorist or not,” he added.
Yassine Kanjaa He has no criminal record nor had he been targeted by Spanish security forces for allegedly suspicious behavior.
Researchers are about to confirm that yes, indeed, would have a psychiatric history registered during their stay in Tangier.
Hours after his arrest, the police entered his home, a squat in central Algeciras on Ruiz Tagle street. there they found the sheath of the machete which Kanjaa used for the attack on the churches. They confiscated his mobile phone and that of a friend of his who had arrived in Algeciras from Morocco the night before.
“Death to Christians!”
It was already getting dark on Wednesday in Algeciras when Kanjaa, clad in the black Muslim robe known as a djellaba, entered the small parish church of San Isidro shouting “Death to Christians!” and “Allah is great!”
He quarreled with the priest and with the people who had gone to mass at seven in the evening, who managed to get the young man out of the church.
But in less than half an hour returned with a machete with which he wounded 74-year-old Father Antonio Rodríguez in the shoulder and neck.
The priest lost large amounts of blood but the wounds did not affect the spinal cord or vertebrae, so he was operated on Wednesday evening and he is recovering.
Machete in hand, Kanjaa walked about two blocks to another church, La Palma, in Algeciras’ Plaza Alta, where he evening mass was ending.
He broke in, smashing religious images, crucifixes and candles. She approached the altar and wounded Diego Valencia, the sacristan who guarded the chalice and the elements of the mass and tried to convince him to leave. Outside the parish, in the concrete square, the young man attacked Valencia again until he was killed.
After mortally wounding the sexton, the attacker attempted to enter the chapel of the capital of Europe, very close to the church of La Palma. Since it was locked, he just fought with the door and left. Minutes later, the police stopped him in a street in the center of Algeciras.
“No one generalizes to any ethnic or religious group,” the president of the autonomous community of Andalusia, Juanma Moreno, asked on Thursday.
“This is a specific, unfortunate, condemnable, disgusting but event it is a specific event -he underlined-. No general conclusions can be drawn from this. And he added: “In Algeciras 129 nationalities live together and in other parts of Andalusia many nationalities also live together and we have never had serious altercations or problems of coexistence”.
“I ask for serenity, calm and that coexistence so characteristic of Andalusians, knowing how to live together in mutual respect”, insisted Moreno.
His words would try to soften the statements of the leader of the far-right Vox party, Santiago Abascal, who fired shots as soon as the attack in Algeciras took place: “Some open their doors to them, others finance them and people suffer. We cannot tolerate Islamism advancing on our soil”.
This Thursday, on his social networks, Abascal underlined: “He entered Spain illegally, he had an expulsion order, he was under jihadist surveillance, he was a squatter. How many will there be like him in Spain?
“The human trafficking mafias and the politicians who open their borders and shower them with subsidies cannot hide their responsibilities,” he lamented.
According to Carlos Igualada, director of the International Observatory for Terrorism Studies, “they are individuals who self-radicalizing through online media or by another external entity but which, in committing such attacks, carries them out on its own and without any type of third party participation or with the support or financing of terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda or the Islamic State”.
this Thursday is a day of mourning in Algeciras. At noon there was a rally in the square where the sacristan Diego Valencia was mortally wounded by Yassine Kanjaa.
Valencia was a very dear neighbor to Algeciras. He was a lay sacristan, he was married and a father. In addition to helping out at church, he was a flower girl and was about to retire. Upon learning of his murder, his wife, an asthma patient, had a respiratory crisis and had to be hospitalized.
Madrid. Corresponding
ap
Source: Clarin
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.